The Power of "Is": A Featured Snippet Case&nbspStudy

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

I’m not a literary scholar, but I believe it was Hamlet that said “to have a featured snippet or not to have a featured snippet?” Ever since featured snippets came onto the scene, sites have been trying to secure them.

My team and I wanted in on this craze. Throughout our journey of research, testing, failure, and success, we found some interesting pieces of information that we wanted to share with the community. I’ll walk you through what we did and show you some of our results (though can’t share traffic numbers).

What are featured snippets?

A featured snippet is the box that appears at the top of the search result page that provides information to succinctly and accurately answer your query and cites a website.

Why are featured snippets important?

A featured snippet is important because it represents an additional SERP feature that you can secure. Usually located at the very top of the results page, featured snippets offer you greater visibility to searchers and can boost brand recognition.

Did we implement everything from what we learned during this discovery phase into our featured snippet strategy? No. Are we perfect at it now after a year and a half of practicing this? No, no, no. We are getting better at it, though.

2. Identify keywords we wanted to target

We originally started out focusing on big “head” keywords. These represented terms that had indeterminate searcher intent. The first head term that we focused on was HRIS. It stands for Human Resources Information System — sexy, right?

Note: Looking back on this, I wish we had focused on longer tail keywords when testing out this strategy. It's possible we could have refined our process faster focusing on long tail keywords instead of the large head terms.

3. Change how we structure our on-page content

We worked closely with our writing team to update how we lay out content on our blog. We changed how we used H2s, H3s (we actually used them now!), lists, and so on to help make our content easier to read for both users and robots.

In most of the content where we’re trying to rank for a featured snippet, we have an H2 in the form of a question. Immediately after the H2, we try and answer that question. We’ve found this to be highly successful (see pictures later on in the post). I wish I could say that we learned this tactic on our first try, but it took several months before this dawned on us.

4. Measure, test, and repeat

The first blog post that we tried this out on was our “What is an HRIS” article. Overall, this post was a success, it ranked for the head term that we were going for (HRIS), but we didn’t win a featured snippet. We deemed it a slight failure and went back to work.

This is where the fun started.

Featured snippet successes

We discovered a featured snippet trigger that we could capitalize on — mainly by accident. What was it?

Is.

Really. That was it. Just by adding that to some of our content, we started to pick up featured snippets. We started to do it more and more, and we were winning more and more featured snippets! I believe it was this strategic HR example that clued us onto the “is” trigger.

So we kept it up.

What did we learn?

I want to preface this by saying that all of this is anecdotal evidence. We haven’t looked at several million URLs, run it through any fancy number-crunching, or had a statistician look at the data. These are just a few examples that we’ve noticed that, when repeated, have worked for us.

Blog/HR glossary - We found that it was easier for us to gain featured snippets from our blog or our glossary pages. It seemed like no matter what optimizations that we made on the product page, we weren’t able to make it happen.

Is - No, not the clown from the Stephen King novel. “Is” seemed to be the big trigger word for winning featured snippets. During our audit, we did find some examples of list featured snippets, but the majority were paragraphs and the trigger word was "is."

Definitions - We saw that definitions of the head term we were trying to go for was usually what got the definition. Our on-page copy would have the H2 with the keyword (e.g. What is Employee Orientation?) and then the paragraph copy would answer that question.

Updating old posts - One surprising thing we learned is that when we went back to old posts and tried adding the “is” trigger word, we didn’t see a change — even if we added a good amount of new content to the page. We were only able to grab featured snippets with new content that we created. Also, when we updated large amounts of content on a few pages that had featured snippets, we lost them. We made sure to not touch the sections of the page that the snippet was pulling from, but we still lost the snippet (some have come back, but some are still gone).

Conclusion

A few final things to note:

First, while these examples are anecdotal, I think that they show some practices that anyone wanting to capture featured snippets can do.

Second, this was process was over a 12–18 month period and we’re still evolving what we think is the best way for us and our content team.

Third, we had a lot of failures with this. I showed you one example, but we’ve had many (short-form content, long-form content, glossary terms, blog posts, etc.) that didn’t work. We just kept measuring, testing, and optimizing.

Lastly, I need to give a shout out to our writing team. We massively disrupted their process with this and they have been phenomenal to work with (effective interdepartmental relationships are crucial for any SEO project).

Let me know what's worked for you or if you have any questions by leaving a comment down below.

Note: On January 23, 2020 Google announced that featured snippets would no longer be listed twice on the first page. For more information, you can check out this thread from Google Search Liaison. This may change how valuable featured snippets are to companies and the amount of clicks a listing gets. Before you start to panic, remember it will be important to watch and measure how this affects your site before doing anything drastic. If you do decide to go nuclear and to remove your featured snippets from the results, check out this documentation.

Great 4-step featured snippet plan of attack! Also interesting to hear that simply adding "is" had such an impact in helping you gain more featured snippets. I am definitely looking forward to testing this out on our websites! Thanks for sharing your examples and screenshots here also.

Very interesting case study here, love how easily applicable this tactic IS! Definitely looking forward to testing this out on my own websites. Appreciate you sharing this tactic and your data here Eric!

Page structure is also a big key to our success. When we first started this process we had to revamp how our writers wrote their posts. It was just a wall of text. Engraining in them how we use H2's and structure our content has been a huge positive for us.

Looking forward to implementing the "featured snippet plan of attack" that you broke down. Great tips! Especially since now if a search is showing a featured snippet, it is essentially "position 1" within a SERP and that result won't be duplicated in the organic results below anymore. Thanks for sharing your insight Eric!

Always love reading a good Featured Snippet case study, nice work Eric. I posted my version of the Hamlet quote on Twitter recently also: "To meta-max-snippet or not to meta-max-snippet, that is the question". Has been interesting to see what Google are doing with Featured Snippet formats at the moment. Just yesterday I showed that Google is doing a widespread test of a desktop format that really doesn't work in content creators best interests. It can contain a carousel of images not from the publishers site (from images that rank highly in Google Images), along with a big 'view all' button that takes you to Image Search with Shopping Ads in most cases... not completely ideal. But I wouldn't jump to going down the meta-max-snippet or data-nosnippet route right away :)

Thank you for sharing this awesome case study and for also being honest in saying that "we had a lot of failures with this. I showed you one example, but we’ve had many (short-form content, long-form content, glossary terms, blog posts, etc.) that didn’t work. We just kept measuring, testing, and optimizing". This article is full of great and simple tips for featured snippets and we definitely looking forward to testing them out!

Wow, a lot of great insight here, especially with Featured Snippets now being the official #1 position on page 1 of Google for many searches. My favorite tip would have to be "Our on-page copy would have the H2 with the keyword (e.g. What is Employee Orientation?) and then the paragraph copy would answer that question." Good stuff sir!

I am definitely excited to try out some of these tips (on our new content) to hopefully help land some new featured snippets! Super helpful and easy tip that "In most of the content where we’re trying to rank for a featured snippet, we have an H2 in the form of a question. Immediately after the H2, we try and answer that question".

Really cool findings about Featured Snippets here Eric! I especially liked that during your audit, you found some examples of list featured snippets, but the majority were paragraphs and the trigger word was "is." Thanks for sharing your case study and data!

Awesome insights on gaining featured snippets here Eric! Definitely interesting how some things worked for new articles, but not for previously posted ones. Appreciate your perspective and sharing your case study!

These snippets have literally changed "SEO" optimising for them has become so valuable whether using schema or optimising text for position 0, the value is enormous and if done correctly is nearly guaranteed to provide valuable results.

However, FAQ schema has been spammed a little too much, and review snippet has forever been spammed. But whilst it's working, may as well!

Thanks for the article on your featured snippet 'is' tip! I wonder what difference it may make using 'is' with active voice compared to a passive voice. I remember reading a year or two ago that Google prefers content writing that is in active voice format vs. passive voice writing.

I've been trying to follow all of the featured snippet developments as they come out, it seems like right now is a very volatile time for them.

Yes, I am going to follow the same method and try to get featured snippets. I am thinking of making the question a heading or sub-heading and then try to define it in the simplest way possible. Something like: What is E-A-T in SEO? And then try to explain it comprehensively. Thanks for this post. :-)

Thanks for these tips. It's important to not just put quality content on the page, but to also make it readable for the bots. The idea of using H2 tags with questions and then answering these questions on authoritative or glossary pages sounds good!

Thanks for writing this article Eric, some great info here for looking at featured snippets. I've seen your comment on uplift in CTR based on FS vs Orangic #1, but any ideas on how this relates to conversion?